Alternative Epilogue #2
She pulled Clara into a hug and launched into the bookmarks, the line, the fans. Jack stood slightly behind and to the left — the position he'd learned was correct for these situations. Close enough to be present. Far enough to not be in the way.
He watched Maeve hold Clara at arm's length.
Watched Mrs. Conley intercept them at the pie table and deliver a monologue about font sizes and her cousin Dorothy.
Watched Clara navigate the attention with the slightly panicked grace of a woman who'd spent three years hiding behind a cartoon avatar and was still getting used to being seen.
She was getting better at it. Not comfortable — Clara would never be fully comfortable with attention, the same way he'd never be fully comfortable with standing still.
But she leaned into it now instead of flinching.
Answered questions instead of deflecting.
Let people tell her they were proud without immediately changing the subject.
He thought about the woman he'd met. The one who'd hauled him out of the ocean. Who'd flinched when anyone got too close to her real work, her real self, the parts she'd learned to hide because someone had taught her they weren't worth showing.
He couldn’t say without his throat closing up that Clara inspired him in ways no one else ever had and he’d made a silent promise that he’d work every single day to be worthy of a woman like her.
"Jack, make sure she eats something before she sits down," Maeve instructed. "She gets shaky when she's nervous."
"Already on it."
He was. He'd been planning the lobster roll intervention since the truck.
There was a particular window — after arrival, before the event started — where Clara could be convinced to eat if you didn't present it as a suggestion but as a fait accompli.
Hand her food. Don't ask. She'd eat it while complaining that she wasn't hungry, and thirty minutes later she'd be grateful.
A year of paying attention. He knew her rhythms now.
The way she needed coffee before conversation.
The way she drew with her left hand braced against the table like she was anchoring herself.
The way she said "I'm fine" when she wasn't and "I'm okay" when she was, and the distance between the two was everything.
***
The signing started at two.
Jack stationed himself at a comfortable distance — close enough to refill Clara's water glass, far enough that she didn't feel watched.
He'd learned this positioning from Maeve, actually, who'd pulled him aside at some point during the winter and said, She needs to know you're there.
She doesn't need you hovering. There's a difference.
He'd thought about that for days. Still thought about it.
Ben had arranged the display while Tyler worked the register. Lena stood behind the table taking photos and threatening anyone who looked uncertain about purchasing.
The line was real. Not massive — this was Beacon's End, not New York — but real.
Townspeople and summer visitors and a handful of readers who'd driven from Portland.
Jack watched them approach the table one by one, watched them tell Clara that her work meant something, watched Clara pause and breathe and hold herself together with the determined composure of someone who was absolutely not going to ugly cry in public.
She was magnificent. Not the word she'd use — she'd say she was surviving, or faking it, or managing. But from where Jack stood, she was magnificent. A woman who'd drawn her way out of the dark on a kitchen floor, sitting in public with her name on a book, letting strangers tell her it mattered.
He brought her the lobster roll between signers. She looked at it, then at him.
"I'm not hungry."
"Eat it anyway."
"You're very bossy."
"Only when I know I’m right.”
She ate it. He refilled her water. A reader approached who wanted to talk about the shipwright character, and Jack fielded the conversation while Clara collected herself — answered questions about carpentry with the easy charm of a man who could talk to anyone about anything, which was a skill he'd honed over seven years of landing in new towns and needing to be useful immediately.
"Is the shipwright based on you?" the reader asked, grinning.
"He's absolutely based on me. Clara denies it."
"He's a fictional character from the 1800s," Clara called from the table without looking up.
"With my emotional arc."
Clara's pen paused. She glanced at him — a quick look, sideways, through her hair — and the corner of her mouth twitched. Not a smile. The ghost of one. The version she wore when she was trying not to encourage him and failing.
He lived for that look.
Then Clara's parents were at the front of the line.
Jack spotted them before she did. Her father in the short-sleeve button-down he wore to everything that wasn't church. Her mother clutching the book like someone might take it from her, eyes already red. They'd waited. Stood in line behind strangers. Like fans.
He stepped back. Farther than his usual distance. This moment wasn't his.
But he watched.
He watched Ida set the book on the table with trembling hands. Watched Clara's father clear his throat and work his jaw the way men did when they were trying to keep it together and losing. Heard him say — quiet, like he was handing her something fragile — Your grandmother would've been proud.
Jack looked at the ground.
Not because he wasn't allowed to see. Because something in his chest had cracked open and he needed a second.
He thought about his own father. Not with the sharp, gutting grief of the anniversary — that had been metabolized over the past year into something quieter, something that lived in his chest like an old scar that ached in cold weather but no longer bled.
He'd done the work. The calls with his mom — weekly now, scheduled, Josie managing the group chat.
The visit at Thanksgiving, where his mother had hugged Clara so hard that Jack had to physically intervene. The morning in January when he'd woken up and the date was just a date — not an anvil, not a countdown, just a square on the calendar — and he'd felt something that might have been peace.
He thought about Paul Callahan's hands. Carpenter's hands, like his.
The same knuckles, the same calluses, the same instinct for what was structural and what was cosmetic.
His father had built things meant to last. Had stayed in one town his whole life, married one woman, raised three kids in a house he'd renovated room by room over twenty years.
Jack had spent seven years running from that model. Afraid that building something permanent meant building something that could be destroyed.
He wasn't running anymore.
He watched Clara's father pat the table — awkward, decisive, done with feelings now — and step aside so Ida could lean across and pull Clara into a hug.
Watched Lena silently hand Clara a tissue.
Watched the line keep moving, patient, steady, while a woman had a moment with her parents at a book signing in a small town in Maine.
Would his father be proud of what Jack was building here?
Not the railing. Not the trim. The life.
Yeah. He decided yeah.
Not confidently. Not without the familiar whisper — the one that sounded like a packed bag and a bus schedule, the ghost that showed up on difficult mornings and said you don't get to keep this. It was quieter now. Easier to talk over. But it was still there, and Jack suspected it always would be.
That was okay. The fear could show up. It could sit at the table. It didn't get to drive.
***
The bonfire lit at dusk.
Same spot. Same crowd. Same Thomas with the torch, his voice carrying across the sand the way it had for however many years Thomas had been doing this — long enough that the speech had become less a recitation and more a ritual, the words worn smooth by repetition like stones in a riverbed.
"Two hundred and thirteen years ago, a group of sailors shipwrecked on these shores..."
Clara leaned into him. His arm came around her — automatic, the weight of a gesture that had stopped being new and started being necessary.
Like breathing. Like the sound of the ocean.
Something his body did without consulting his brain, because his body had figured out months ago what his brain was still occasionally arguing about: this was where he belonged.
Right here. Arm around this woman. On this beach.
In this town that had pulled him in like a current and held him like a harbor.
Last year, this moment had been electric with newness. This year it was better. It was familiar. The warmth of a body he knew as well as his own, the smell of linseed oil and sea salt, the particular way Clara fit against his side like she'd been designed to go there.
"...they built a fire. And that fire brought them together..."
His phone buzzed. A photo from Josie. Brody and his little sister on the couch, holding a copy of Tidal Lock between them — the book open to a spread of Marina at the prow.
Brody was pointing at the sea witch with an expression of delighted horror.
Sophie appeared to be attempting to eat the corner.
The caption read: Brody wants to know if the sea witch is real. Sophie tried to eat the book. We're very proud of our aunt.
Aunt.
He tilted the screen toward Clara and watched her face do the thing. The bright eyes. The pressed mouth. The face-in-his-shoulder move that she thought hid her reaction but actually told him everything.
He held her tighter. Partly because she needed it and partly because his own eyes were doing something he wasn't prepared to explain, and one of them had to keep it together in public.
"...to Beacon's End!" Thomas shouted, torch touching kindling, the fire roaring to life. "And to all the shipwrecked sailors who found their way home!"
"To Beacon's End!" the crowd echoed.